Wednesday March 30, 2011
KUALA LUMPUR: Financial literacy is important to enable people to protect themselves in an environment that offers increasingly complex and sophisticated investment products.
Securities Industry Development Corp (SIDC) chief executive officer John Zinkin said some people needed to be guided on how to manage their money for savings and investments.
“They need to understand not just income and expenditure but also save, budget and invest. They have to understand the whole concept,” he told a media briefing yesterday.
Zinkin said different stages of life required different financial needs and SIDC’s financial literacy programme, Bijak Mengurus Wang (BMW), would cater to differ levels of learning.
He said the programme, aimed at creating knowledge and vigilant investors, had benefited 21,133 participants.
The programme teaches participants about smart money management, wise investing and how to spot scams.
To gauge the programme’s effectiveness, SIDC has recently engaged a third party to conduct an impact survey among 800 random participants.
The survey shows that 87.3% of the participants are now more vigilant when considering an investment, 85.8% have started implementing personal budget and 84.4% have started setting financial goals.
Zinkin said 88% of the participants had also set aside some money as force saving before spending their income every month.
More than half of the respondents have opted for automatic salary deduction facility to practice “pay yourself first”. Additionally, 46% of the participants had become investors for the first time after attending the programme.
This year, SIDC hopes to educate 5,500 people. The programme, which is free for all, is part and parcel of the overall effort by the Securities Commission (SC) to promote investor education.
For more information, visit www.sidc.com.my or www.min.com.my.
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